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Colleges Wrestle With Thumb Drives
Lucas123 writes "IT managers at colleges and universities are grappling with the problem of finding ways to better secure removable storage media in an environment that encourages information sharing. Draconian security mandates 'may be common in the corporate world, but "we don't have the flexibility to simply say all inbound traffic is locked down," said Jason Pufahl, information security team lead for IT services at the University of Connecticut.'"
This one seems to be about people being able to move data around on removable storage. Why does a college have a problem with this?
We had a situation at work where we had to lock down the floppy drives on machines because people might steal stuff. The fact that they also had email and web access didn't make any difference to the people making the policy.
My institute of higher learning utilizes Deep Freeze on all computers and restores them all to their original state (except for a 'storage' partition) every weekend. It seems to do the job quite well.
Universities really CAN'T lock systems down in the kind of way a workplace can. I'm doing a Master's degree in Information Technology (basically a one year conversion course Computing Science for those with different first degrees). We have to write software for our dissertations and this often involves making use of other people's software, sometimes libraries, sometimes compiled programs. We wouldn't be able to do our dissertations if we couldn't install more software. It's not practical to have to have to get permission for every peice of software every student needs. I'm sure many of the academic staff also need to do these things in order to do their own research.
University networks are not like work networks. You can't enforce a standard set of tools and be sure that no one needs to run anything else
todo - The developer's equivalent of confession: "Forgive me Father, for I have sinned..."
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